Introduction to Traditional Education Approaches
Traditionally, the standard approach in our schools is to try to succeed in the various tests the students face. In other words, the school and the teacher are evaluated and assessed based on a student’s level of success in the final examinations. A school or a teacher may only be considered ‘good’ if all their efforts are solely focused on preparing students for the final exams.
Exam-Focused Educational System
In most classrooms, it is expected to come across statements highlighting the importance of specific questions and their potential relevance to exams. Such statements may include: "This question is important as it might be included in the exam." "If this question appears on the exam, it is advisable to respond using this approach." "Answering differently may result in a lower grade." "This question was on last year's entrance exam." "It is recommended to respond to multiple-choice questions using this strategy." In short, all the teacher's efforts are directed towards assessment, and in a way, all education serves the purpose of evaluation. Simply put, our primary focus in teaching is to meet the exam requirements, with the primary goal being to perform well on exams rather than using exams to facilitate better learning.
Emerging Educational Approaches
The report began with the term ‘traditionally’; the truth is that this perspective remains prevalent, with many teachers and schools continuing to follow the same approach. However, new educational approaches have emerged, focusing on alternative assessment methods. Student evaluation serves a purpose beyond promotion to higher grades or passing final exams. It is an integral part of the education process, supplementing the learning experience and identifying areas of improvement and weaknesses.
The Role of Constructive Feedback in Learning
When assessments reveal that many students struggle with a particular subject, it highlights flaws in the teaching methods. Teachers must then reteach the material, ensuring all students grasp the concepts. Constructive feedback becomes a valuable tool in this scenario, helping address individual learning gaps and enhance overall education quality.
Method and Problem Statement
Challenges of Assessment-Oriented Teaching
Assuming that a teacher follows an assessment-oriented approach to serve education and intends to use the assessment results to improve and correct their teaching, they usually lack the experience and appropriate strategies for providing effective feedback. They often resort to phrases such as "Practice more," "Pay closer attention," "Put in more effort," and "Be careful with mistakes," etc.
Research Goals
In this research, we are looking for a real and effective solution for corrective feedback to help improve the student’s learning conditions in secondary school. We have chosen to study the senior years because of the importance of their final exams throughout the last three years of high school and their significant impact on their university entrance exam results. Naturally, this matter highlights the importance of the evaluation process in their education. In this study, we intend to find a solution to push teachers to use evaluation to improve and complete the education process.
Theoretical Foundation of Evaluation in Education
Understanding the Feedback Cycle
The 'Evaluation in Service of Education' approach consists of several key stages:
- Teaching Process: Begins with teaching based on defined educational goals.
- Evaluation Phase: This will be followed by an evaluation to determine if goals are achieved.
- Results Analysis: Critical analysis of evaluation results to identify weaknesses.
- Constructive Feedback: Providing feedback based on learning outcomes to guide improvement.
Educational activities should always aim to meet learning goals, with evaluations focusing on achievement rather than mere numerical scores or percentages.
Across all these stages, identifying and focusing on the educational goals is extremely important and influential. The academic activities are designed based on the learning goals. Then, the evaluation process determines whether these goals have been reached. A student's weaknesses or problems in a subject are defined as not meeting the learning goals. When analyzing the results, the focus is on determining how well the learning goals have been achieved.
Therefore, examining the educational goals is more important than just looking at numerical scores or percentages. Instead of just looking at test scores or whether students passed or failed, the analysis evaluates how well the students achieved the defined learning goals. This is why analyzing results differs from traditional quantitative approaches, which focus on the percentage of correct answers.
The Neglected Step: Providing Corrective Feedback
The crucial part of this cyclical process that often gets neglected is providing corrective feedback to students. Typically, the teaching and evaluation happens in schools, and teachers, drawing on their experience, have a general understanding and perspective on the results. While this general sense the teacher has is not enough, it does provide them with a basic grasp of the overall situation. The feedback step is often ignored and not given proper attention, so the entire cycle is implemented incompletely. As a result, the evaluation results cannot be effectively used to further the educational goals.
Research Design
Interactive Digital Subject-Based Books
A brief research project was conducted at a high school to explore using a collection of interactive digital subject-based books in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology to provide corrective feedback to students by teachers and to assess the impact of this approach. One advantage of these subject-based books is that they allow students with weaknesses in specific topics to focus on those areas. This makes the book collection suitable for providing corrective feedback to students.
Research Steps:
Given the timing of the first-term exams and to help students mentally prepare for the conditions of the end-of-year final exams, specific exams were designed and administered jointly with several high schools, following the standards of the final exams. After grading, the exam papers were provided to the 10th and 11th grade students.
After brief training, each person analyzed their exam paper based on the learning objectives and topics covered. For example, a single educational topic may have been addressed in multiple exam questions.
The student's performance on these sample questions was used to measure how well they had mastered the educational objectives for each subject. Based on this analysis, each student could identify the topics they struggled with the most in each course. Each student was then given a relevant subject-based book corresponding to their identified weaknesses as a form of corrective feedback. Students were given one week to thoroughly study the subject-specific books provided to address their shortcomings in those areas. After this period, they took a brief test on the same topics to assess their progress and improvement. The students also filled out a questionnaire to share their thoughts and feelings about this process and how helpful the subject-focused books had been.
The goal was to give students dedicated time and resources to target their learning gaps and evaluate how effectively they enhanced their understanding through this personalized intervention. The student feedback would also provide valuable insights.
Research Results
The results of this study can be examined in two ways. First, the class test scores after the students used the subject-specific books as a corrective measure showed that the students who spent enough time carefully studying the provided books performed well on the subsequent tests. Second, the critical insights from the student questionnaires would provide valuable information about the student's views on how helpful and impactful the subject-focused materials were. The quantitative evidence indicates an important point - the students who spent an appropriate amount of time thoroughly reviewing the books and engaging with them with interest achieved good results on the class tests. This suggests that subject-based books had a positive impact on these students.
The suggestion to have students study subject-specific self-study books that they can comprehend without the teacher's presence can serve as effective feedback to address issues and shortcomings. This can be a suitable solution for teachers to utilize this opportunity for the often-neglected teaching and evaluation cycle component.
One crucial finding is comparing the amount of time tenth--, eleventh--, and twelfth-grade high school students dedicate to completing this independent learning task.
In certain high schools, where 12th-graders dedicate long hours to daily studies and must often stay after school, there is little time left for using digital self-instructional books. However, these digital learning resources may be more effective in areas with fewer educational services, where students have more time after school. The data also indicates that 11th-graders showed relatively less interest than 10th-graders, suggesting teacher encouragement is essential for students to utilize this feedback-oriented learning. For it to be truly effective, there needs to be an initial willingness and recognition of weaknesses from the students; they need to have a genuine desire to address and overcome their weaknesses through independent study.
As a secondary point, the teacher's role is to justify the students' feedback and assure them that a good result will be obtained if the feedback is done accurately, significantly impacting the work's successful completion. If these two steps are not taken well, the feedback is not sufficiently clear and transparent, and the student does not know precisely why and how they should do something, so the corrective feedback will not be effective.
The Questionnaire
The following points have been extracted and summarized by examining the questionnaires completed by the students. Based on these cases, we can look into the research cycle in later stages to improve the results and quality.
At this stage, we only aim to investigate the effect of subject-specific books. A summary of the results is as follows:
- The time the students had allocated to go through a book was between half an hour and 8 hours and, on average, between 2 to 3 hours.
- The level of student satisfaction with the films was relatively high. Moreover, the students who had allocated more time to reading the books expressed greater satisfaction. This suggests that the weaker reactions from the other students were likely due to the fact that they had not spent sufficient time engaging with the books.
- In addition to the above point, which is also true for the interactive files, most students expressed positive feedback about the attractiveness of the files. However, some students also reported issues while executing the files.
- The exercises and assessments received the most favorable feedback and were adequate for the students.
- A number of the respondents expressed that the sections directly taken from the textbook were unnecessary.
- The majority of respondents believed that the books they had seen would be helpful for weaker students or for those who had difficulties with the subject matter. They mentioned they would recommend the books to such students. However, the respondents felt the book might not be as useful for stronger students.
- Overall, the respondents were generally satisfied with the book's price. However, some believed that by searching online, they might be able to find better content for free. In that case, they would prefer to spend the money on internet access rather than purchasing the book.
- Half of the respondents were keen on getting to know and use the other digital books, and the other half pointed to the price, other resources available on the Internet, and their preference for printed versions as reasons for not using the other subject-specific digital books.
- The majority of respondents believe the current books are designed for self-study. However, they still prefer to have a teacher present to guide them through the material. Additionally, some respondents highlighted the importance of accessing teaching videos from the instructor to complement the self-learning process.
- The final feedback did not include any significant recommendations. A few respondents suggested adding graded exercises, lowering prices, and providing access to a tutor to complement the self-study materials.
Conclusion
The feedback and evaluation process implemented in the high school proved valuable and replicable. Active involvement from school counselors and subject teachers was crucial. Teachers should guide students, especially those in lower grades, in effectively using tailored content.
An unintended yet valuable experience emerged when a math teacher used a subject-specific book to teach trigonometry, effectively integrating digital materials into classroom instruction.
Implementing Subject-Based Books for Enhanced Learning
Schools can leverage subject-specific books in three key ways:
- Targeted Remedial Support: Provide books to students identified as weak in specific subjects.
- 12th-Grade Exam Preparation: Focus on problem areas after the holidays.
- Curriculum Enhancement: Integrate supplementary book content into regular classroom teaching.
By adopting these strategies, subject-specific books can offer remedial support, aid in exam preparation, and enhance overall curriculum delivery.